October 02, 2013

Free Trade And Fair Trade

"Many people believe that they are helping the third world develop when they buy overseas goods. However, each purchase should be scrutinised and determined whether it actually does help the citizens of these countries. Sometimes commodities produced in developing countries are controlled by multi-nationals at the price of those countries' own self-sustainability,'' writes Val Yule.

September 18, 2013

Best Possible Education

September 11, 2013

Violent Video Games

"People whose environment has no terror in it, do not copy the violence in terror-filled games, but people who live amid violence can learn to copy the violence they see in games which have a similar context to their own lives,'' declares Val Yule.

A Female History Of Sex

May 22, 2013

Fairy Floss And The Eiffel Tower

...“Yuck!” I said, as loudly as I could, and I pushed it back at her. I thought she was a horrible little girl for making me eat the stuff. I might have pushed her harder than I meant to, because she fell off her chair and she started crying...

Val Yule tells of a child who did not behave as well as she was expected to behave.

March 20, 2013

Inventing Alternatives

March 13, 2013

Play The Wishing Game

Val Yule suggests that the wishing game can be played to keep your mind occupied during boring meetings or when you are finding it difficult to fall asleep. It can be played individually or in a group.

January 02, 2013

Wanted Babies

December 26, 2012

Hoarding

"Hoarding is popularly said to be a problem of our age, but it may turn out to be tomorrow's salvation. And it isn't the problem of our age - which is acquiring what you do not need,'' writes Val Yule.

December 12, 2012

Noise In The Garden

"The noises of children in a garden are lovely - I am fortunate that there is a well-behaved school over my back fence, and as I enjoy the garden, I hear the laughter of children at play,'' writes Val Yule.

August 01, 2012

A Stitch In Time...

"Much of what the West throws out into landfill only needs mending - and what a lot of carbon emissions and non-renewable resources could then be saved. Many forests might not need to be cut down,'' writes Val Yule.

July 18, 2012

The Effects Of Violent Video Games

People whose environment has no terror in it, do not copy the violence in terror-filled games, but people who live amid violence can learn to copy the violence they see in games which have a similar context to their own lives, writes Val Yule.

November 30, 2011

Star Wars - Star Peace

November 23, 2011

Waste Of Effort

"How did the Victorians of the 19th century manage to get so much done? Because they did. So many of them had the energy to fill every minute of every day with what they believed were 'Good Works' - and often they were,'' writes Val Yule.

Help For The “Have-Nots’’

September 21, 2011

Cutting Waste

A Nobel Prize must go to whoever resolves the fatal contradiction between the economic need to increase consumption to save jobs (and profits) and the environmental need to cut consumption to save the environment and resources for our future, writes Val Yule.

August 17, 2011

Ageing Populations

August 10, 2011

Ageing Populations - Not A Problem

"Most old people contribute to the community and the economy in inestimable voluntary work in every area, including as grandparents, who provided 68% of all informal child care in Australia in 1997,'' says Val Yule.

July 27, 2011

Fashion Innovations

July 13, 2011

Look Behind You When You Leave

"When I was a child thinking that the bushland and the seascapes were infinite, we used to go with our buckets and bring home what we found in the rock pools, and collect all the wildflowers we could pick from the bush'' recalls Val Yule.

"Now the fish and other creatures and the living shellfish are gone from the pools.''

June 15, 2011

Applied Imagination - 9

June 08, 2011

Applied Imagination - 8

"When imagination becomes inured to blockbusters, explicit gore, constant novelties, explosions of information, or the ear becomes used to decibels that verge on damage to the eardrums, then softer music, finer emotions and feelings such as sentiment, gentleness, subtlety, appear blanched and insipid,'' says Val Yule.

March 09, 2011

Korea As It Used To Be – 6

...We left in the early morning, when the country-side was fresh and beautiful with dew. It was Chosen, the Land of the Morning Calm, before the wind rises, - with the delicate poplars and quaint bent pines and patterned terraces and tidy clusters of villages and blue lakes edged with white sand. There were the herons and the fishermen; the back of a bullock harrowing among the green barley by the yellow road; the black goats being driven over a graceful stone bridge...

Val Yule concludes her account of the time she spent in Korea some 60 years ago before the country was riven in two by war.

March 02, 2011

Korea As It Was - 5

...Their dancing enthralled me. I have seen Australian toddlers bouncing around to music. These children, boys and girls, moved like entranced ballet-dancers; they pretended to be birds with such grace that I held my breath. It was perfectly spontaneous, free movement that they made up to the music...

Val Yule continues her account of life in Korea before a fierce war tore the country apart.

February 23, 2011

Korea As It Was - 4

...Sometimes school children were excursioning on the hills, vivid dots among banks of azaleas. Or a couple of old gentlemen would be sitting in a little pagoda of a play-house, half-way up with a good view reserved for such old gentlemen to enjoy. Usually on a hill-side somewhere, were round green knolls, the graves of ancestors, set among a few crooked pine-trees...

Val Yule travelled by train from Seoul to Pusan in the days before Korea was torn apart by war.

February 16, 2011

Korea As It Once Was - 3

...There were also spavined, sway-backed horses looking as if they were slung on stilts, and tiny, miserable furry donkeys, half-buried under their loads of pine-brushwood, the universal fuel. Bicycles dodged in and out, - and what bicycles. They had heavy, crude, solid frames, always going back to the welders, but at night they looked rather beautiful, as each carried a low-slung, flickering carbide lamp, with flames that seemed to lick the rider’s feet every time the pedals came around...

Val Yule describes the Korea of long ago, before the country was torn apart by war.

Korea As It Once Was - 2

February 02, 2011

Korea As It Once Was -1

Val Yule tells of arriving in Korea before the 1951-52 war as a 21-year-old with her husband who was going to teach at Seoul University. This is the first of a six-part account of life in the Korea of that era.

Don’t Waste The Murray River

January 19, 2011

Regional Currency

...Local economics is possible, while a community is at the same time also participating in national economics, with banks, supermarkets and imports of what cannot reasonably be supplied in the region...

Val Yule suggests a novel way of keeping small communities ticking in hard economic times.

June 16, 2010

The Wonderful Lawns Of The Future

…Lawns reflect a 200-year-old Romantic dream of fusing ourselves with nature. Yet that very dream now poses a major threat to the nature it so lovingly celebrates. Everyone with a pocket-handkerchief of a lawn thinks they need their own several-hundred-dollar noise-making polluting neighbor-annoying petrol-mower. Why? MOST suburban lawns do not need the great enormous waste of power mowers…

June 09, 2010

Human Rights

June 02, 2010

Mark Twain - Social Reformer

...Twain, with his sharp eye for nonsense, was an energetic campaigner for spelling reform. Lacking modern knowledge of linguistics and cognitive psychology, he was a ‘spell-as-you-speak’ Pitman’s shorthand man, and like Shaw, wrote in a new shorthand himself, but he was very aware of the problems of both the old spelling and the new, and of the reactions of the public...

Val Yule, along with Twain and other celebrated figures, is an enthusiastic supporter of a more logical form of spelling.

May 26, 2010

Goldfield Teacher - 5

…The goldfields teacher represented the Victorian pedagogue at his most enlightened. He was so enthusiastic about his belief that education could produce a civilised society, and that knowledge distinguished civilisation from the savage…

VaL Yule concludes her account of a remarkable man who taught at a school in the New South Wales goldfields in the 19th Century.

May 12, 2010

A Goldfield Schoolmaster - 3

...“Thirty years ago there was a strong prejudice extant against educating the poor children, lest their enlightenment should produce discontent but this benighted fallacy has exploded and vanished into thin air. Education does not promote discontent, but on the contrary, lightens labor and conduces to happiness.”...

Val Yule continues her account of a highly gifted school master who taught in a rural part of New South Wales in the early years of the Nineteenth Century.

March 31, 2010

Music As Noise - Part 2

...At a time when we need brains that can work at capacity, is there any evidence that long term exposure to very loud music might affect abilities such as thinking of more than one thing at a time, connecting ideas, reasoning, concentration, intellectual curiosity, ability to face the problems of our time or mental stamina itself?...

Val Yule presents the results of a survey which asked young people why they like loud music.

March 24, 2010

Music As Noise - Part 1

"Almost anything we make can be used. Everything we make can be abused,'' says Val Yule, going on to consider whether the flood of loud music which assaults our lives may have a long-term damaging effect on our lives.

March 17, 2010

Reading Help

March 14, 2010

The Child Migrant

...We were alarmed about the farm orphanage he had come to in Australia. Although the boy’s report of it was ‘OK’ and he had fun with the other boys, it was noticeable that when he came down to us for holidays he improved rapidly in reading and behaviour, and the gains were lost by the next holiday. The orphanage also took no interest in the boys once they had left. They were out in the world alone. When it closed, they had no links left...

Val Yule brings a first-hand account of children who were give no reason for hope - an account which is distressing yet at the same time inspirational.

February 10, 2010

Rimes With Reason

February 03, 2010

Care Of The Elderly

Of all the nursing homes I have visited, the ones where residents live longest and healthiest and happiest are those where the staff say straight out, ‘We don’t bother with trying to cure, or even forcing them to keep fit. We just want them to have fun.’

Val Yule brings a host of practical suggestions to improve the lives of older folk who need full-time care.

December 30, 2009

A Card Was Born

Joyncie zipped in among the guests at a Greek Orthodox wedding offering them packets of SunWhite rice from his mother’s shop, so all could join in the general throwing. He transcended the linguistic barrier with a most effective sign-language of gambols and gesticulation, interrupted with giggles, but his round eyes alone would have been sufficient.

December 26, 2009

People They Laughed At - 5

…For ten years from 1834 on, Charles Goodyear was laughed at for trying to solve the problems of how rubber could be produced as a useful product. He suffered one fiasco after another, and he was often in jail for debt…

Val Yule lists more people and ideas which attracted derision when they came to the attention of the public.